We’re feeling energised as we zoom through the first month of the new year. That’s because we can see what’s ahead, and we’re excited about the possibilities. Are you ready to set sail with us? We’re celebrating what’s been achieved in partnership with people just like you so far, while setting our sights on facilitating more important conversations in more places and having even more positive impact on more communities. We’re ready to embrace where engagement and deliberation are going, are you?
A message of thanks to you - our clients, participants, partners and friends - and hope for what’s ahead. As we head towards the end of a big year of big conversations, our team shares what they’re grateful for, their biggest highlight of 2023 and what’s really lighting them up when they think forward to the new year ahead.
Meet the newest additions to the MosaicLab team: Belinda Lowing and Fox Gillen. Both Belinda and Fox have long career histories that span across interesting and complex roles that have included facilitation and engagement in many forms. Learn more about these two and gain some insights into who they REALLY are through their answers to our fast five questions!
Ever wondered what makes our facilitators tick? Meet the newest additions to the MosaicLab team: Jody Kingston and Aaron Bosch. Both Aaron and Jody have fascinating, diverse backgrounds and have come to MosaicLab and facilitation via interesting pathways. Find out what they love about their work, what impact they hope to have and how they answered a list of fun and probing questions that we like to call The Telling Top 10...
Four language interpreters. Child-minding. Recruitment challenges. Birthday cake and a lot of laughs. These are just some of the unique highlights of our work with Quit Victoria and VicHealth in 2022 on a project to reduce tobacco-related harm in public housing. This case study takes a detailed look at how MosaicLab supported this process with a residents’ panel and sense-making workshops. All to drive improved, long-term outcomes for community and public health.
‘Transparency’ is a key term in the world of engagement. We all know that it’s central to any robust, effective engagement process.
It’s also a word that, for some, goes hand in hand with risk and a loss of order and control. That makes sense - because being honest, sharing the problem and providing in-depth insights into an issue can feel scary.
Today, we're addressing this myth and providing some reasons to be brave, risks to be aware of and key starting points when it comes to transparency.
Development of a high-level engagement framework, policy or strategy is an important step in building an engaging organisation. Having this document finalised, however, does not indicate that the hard work is over.
To truly embed engagement across an organisation, overarching strategies must be brought to life through implementation. Today, we're addressing this myth by providing 10 ways to start embedding engagement across the organisation and see your engagement strategy put into practice.
When you’re preparing information inputs for a community engagement process, organisations can spend a lot of time producing glossy brochures and simplified, summarised content. It’s easy to get lost in all the posters and paragraphs and lose sight of what’s important - what you’re really saying about the issue or decision at hand.
Getting the balance right can be challenging. So, in this post we’ll not only address this months myth, we’ll also give you 6 simple tips for providing the right information at the right level of detail.
It’s an easy trap to fall into, and an approach that’s often taken as a matter of course – solidify your organisation’s position before you engage with any external community or stakeholders. While this may appear (in the short term) to make your organisation feel more ready to engage, it actually undermines many of the objectives of a robust engagement process.
Now and then we hear people say that what you might loosely categorise as ‘warm up’ or ‘introductory’ or ‘getting to know you’ activities are pointless exercises with no real purpose. It is assumed (perhaps?) that they are something facilitators do just because that’s what facilitators do and they like to ‘play games, not because they have any bearing on the issue at hand or any tangible benefit to the group.
We can’t speak on behalf of all these types of activities (perhaps there are some out there that really are annoying, pointless and fluffy!); however, today, with the kind of activities that an effective, experienced facilitator might use in mind, we’re debunking this myth.
Online tools are an important part of the modern engagement landscape. They offer a broad range of benefits from ease and flexibility of access to handy data analysis options. They can be absolutely worth the investment, and are integral parts of most successful, contemporary engagement processes.
However, it's a mistake to think that a great online platform or tool alone will solve all your engagement problems or attract high levels of participation - no matter how much you spent on building it or how long you spent on perfecting it.
This monthly myth touches on a mistake that is pretty easy to make and can catch organisations out, leaving them without much of a return on what can be a significant investment.
Many organisations try to minimise risk by 'holding the reins tight' when it comes to communicating with their communities and stakeholders around engagement processes and major projects/decisions.
This so-called 'risk averse' approach tends to include carefully constructing tightly worded (yet often very uninformative) key messages and strictly withholding any information deemed potentially inflammatory or uncomfortable - even when inextricably relevant to the issue at hand.
There's also approval processes applied to the release of any information, which can slow down communication activities - sometimes to a considerable extent - depending on how rigid or intricate these processes are.
While organisations tend to feel comfortable with this well-worn approach, the promise of 'safety' through control is generally just an illusion.
Our May #MonthlyMyth focuses on an assumption that is often made about the community by managers, project leads and technical 'experts'.
Statements like "if only they understood X, Y or Z, they would see we were right!" are an indication of a potentially risky, yet common assumption that community opposition or distrust is based on ignorance or incapacity.
Our monthly myth for March is here! Low participation rates is a problem many organisations face when it comes to community engagement activities. The cause of this, however, is not always obvious. Today we're exploring some of the other (common) reasons that people don't get involved in your process.
